Sometimes, we keep touching the wound not to see if it's healed already, but to make sure that it hasn't. When you attach your identity or your purpose to your grief, anger and trauma, it almost becomes an act of self-preservation to hold on to that pain for as long as possible. Because it's familiar. But what lies beyond the treshold of all that pain? When it's washed off by the slow but irrevocable pressure of time? What lies there is a great unknown. The you absent of all your pain and struggles. Who are they? Are they worthy of love? What do they look like? What is their core identity, if not all the hardship that burnished them like iron? I know it's scary, but you have to step into that great unknown. You have to give yourself that chance, the chance to discover who you are when you're not in survival mode. When you're not depressed, anxious, fighting every day to make it to the next. You have to discover what your spirit looks like when it's not drowned and choked by grief.